It will be a full 21 months before these edges are touched up. Writing a blog after the fact gives you a different perspective on each of your projects. Sometimes you’re surprised by how quickly something seemed to move along (even if it felt slow at the time), and other times the low priority projects seem to live on forever.
Rewiring of the box beams and central fixture in the dining room. Two lessons were learned in this project:
1) Don’t take apart the box beams. When we did this for the living room, we came up with the much better method of drilling all the way up into the joist cavity and just feeding the wires through to the attic spaces upstairs.
2) Don’t permit work like this. This was the first time we ever got a building permit, and we came to regret it. The inspector was unhappy that the wires came through holes in the wood and did not terminate in a box. While I definitely believe that building codes are a good thing, there are times where the letter of the law conflicts with something that would still be safe. Obviously, very little in an old house would meet code, so any remodeling is an exercise in finding the right compromise between codes and aesthetics.
After a lot of effort, we were able to solve the problem by buying the smallest possible “pancake” boxes and painting them to match the beam stain. We were fortunate that the 3 1/2″ size was very close to the diameter of the fixtures bases, so they basically act as spacers between the fixture and the beam. If you didn’t know to look for them, you’d never notice them.
The living room, like the dining room and foyer, has the original, stained woodwork. While it’s not in perfect condition, it looks very good and gives a feel of real craftsmanship. Also, we were very excited about having a fireplace again!
Among the many other unusual things about this house was the fact that there were very few openable windows in the downstairs. Notice how the picture and double hung windows on the left side of the picture are not actually windows. Someone went to the trouble of removing the original windows and replacing them with sheet glass. It was like being in an office building, with no fresh air. We put opening windows high on our rehab list.
This is how our dining room looked when we bought the house. The intact, unstained woodwork was one of the main factors that drew us to this house. We had looked at so many houses that had painted or, even worse, missing woodwork. We really fell in love with the look of the flat-grained fir wainscotting and box beams. We later replaced the fixture with a more appropriate (Craftsman) one, and we moved this one out onto the back patio. We were not, however, very fond of the fact that all the windows had been removed from the room, cutting off any potential for airflow.
